were you diagnosed with Aspergers as an adult?

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Hi, just wondering what everyone's stories are on having been diagnosed with Aspergers as an adult? What led to you getting a diagnoses and what do you think (if anything) contributed to it not being done earlier in life? X

I was diagnosed at age 55 because for most of my life anything but severe autism was little known.
I was diagnosed because because my sister teaches special needs children noticed her brother had autistic traits and stagedan intervention.

No

My type of autism wasn't recognised when I was young. I found out I am autistic when my son was diagnosed. It's a common way for us older people to find out. My Mother went for an assessment after my sons diagnosis and she was diagnosed with Aspergers. When she suggested to her brother that he should get tested too, he said he had already been diagnosed but hadn't thought to tell anyone

I read about Asperger somewhere in the internet, found out it explains my quirks and social problems and it become a special interest right away (I was researching it daily 14h/day for 2 years) so I decided to get diagnosed. And here I am. There wasn't much doubt other than one psychologist saying "It looks more like an immature personality for me" but 3 other (an autism specialist, a psychiatrist and another psychologist) agreed with me. I received my diagnosis when I were 25.

I believe I wasn't diagnosed because AS diagnosis wasn't known in Poland when I were a kid and the child psychiatrist that checked me when I were 3 year old (based on preschool caregivers saying "There is something wrong with her") told my parents "You have very inteligent daughter. Her social development is delayed but she is smart so she will catch up". They took the information and dismissed all my future problems with "She is too smart for the idiots to understand her so it's natural she is bullied" so they never took me to a doctor afterwards, pretending the problem is me being smarter than peers and telling me to "not worry about the idiots". Easier said than done.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22 because my mother didn't want a special child. it took a few years after turning 18 to get the proper health care and paperwork done since she was fighting me on it and it was hard to prove without a valid history of unusual childhood behavior. I had to get disability advocate to gather all my past medical records and build a case for me.

Diagnosed is lucrative term in my scenario. From what I understand there is still no "official" autism test. For me High Functioning Autism (formerly known as Aspergers) is used an umbrella term for all my spectrum common disorders and symptoms such as, mild stimming when stressed, non epileptic seizures, black outs, loss of muscle control and sporadic stability issues. I was awarded disability based on this so I use it in all my Psychological evaluations and therapy appointments.

With that being said I don't know how I feel about using Autism to explain my idiosyncrasies. I can't really give autism all the credit for my shticks and beliefs when i feel so strongly about certain ideals and err on the artistic, expressive side of life which has just been "weird" or "eccentric" up until this point. It feels like an attempt to brand all artistic individuals. To the extreme it feels like Auschwitz branding. Autism isn't required to be unique, but Autistic people usually are. I don't know if the labeling is helping in this regard and have mixed feelings.

I was diagnosed at 23, after being in contact with the psychiatry to get help with depression and anxiety. Several doctors pointed out that I showed a lot of signs of being on the spectrum, and so the diagnosis came along a few years later.
The biggest reason for it not being discovered in childhood is because my brother has much more severe autism, so in comparison to him I seemed like a very normal child. Also, my parents had their hands full with him, so I guess no one paid me that much attention.
The reason why I didn't seek help earlier (even though depression and anxiety started showing up at the age of was partly because I was scared of getting confirmed that I was "crazy", and would get locked up and medicated. Also, because even though I always felt different, I didn't want to admit it. Because to me, being different was something good, and because of poor self esteem, I kept telling myself that there's nothing different or special about me at all, and I'm just whining.
Getting the diagnosis has really improved my self esteem. Now I can be happy about being "special".

They sent me to child psychologists when I was 6; 1965. Asperger's wasn't talked about in the literature until 1981, and wasn't acepted as a diagnosis until the '90s. They just said that I was LD/ADD (Dyscalculia) and antisocial (an as*hole). Oh,yeah; and in their infinite wisdom decreed a six year old as a latent homosexual. You can imagine how well that went over with the grown-ups.
Current therapist suggested ASD testing based upon my non-existant social skills, LD, and the observation that the only children he's ever known to be tortured so consistently by their peers were Asperger's kids.